Top 20 Dev Tools for 2019

There are a lot of challenges when it comes to building great software. Every year, more and more software products come on the market, which means it’s becoming increasingly important to work efficiently. If you’re not the first-to-market, the cheapest, or the best, your software product isn’t going hack it in this competitive market.

As a company, Axosoft has been building software products that increase developer productivity since 2002. We were founded on a Scrum project management software by the same name. In my nearly five years with the company, we’ve developed two more products: GitKraken, a cross-platform Git client, and Glo Boards, a task and issue tracking system.

We dogfood our own products while building them, and we use a lot of other amazing software to help us release quicker and with fewer bugs. We could have put together our own list of the best development tools, but for the last two years, we’ve asked our community instead.

In keeping with tradition, we asked software engineers from elite organizations across the world to tweet their top 5 developer tools using #MustHaveDevTools. After meticulously aggregating the data from over 1,000 tweets, I’m happy to share the 20 best developer tools with you—ranked in order of most votes.

Top Pick:

#1️⃣ in votes for 3 years in a row

We reached over one million users in 2018, and we’re honored to have received the most votes for the third year in a row!

Let’s dive into which other developer tools have grown in popularity year-over-year, which are new to the scene, and which have fallen from the ranks. The Golden Kraken Awards acknowledge the other three highest-voted tools. This year, we congratulate a newcomer and two veteran tools!

Linux: Open source software operating systems built around the Linux kernel.

*️⃣ New to the list. 🐧

Year-over-year trends

Docker is the tool to watch! Now in the number 3 position, this rising star increased in popularity by 7 spots in 1 year.

Visual Studio tied with Docker for the largest year-over-year gain in popularity—rising 7 spots from number 13 to number 6.

Four new tools made the list for 2019: Azure, Trello, Google and Linux.

A task tracking tool made the list for the first time. Now imagine if it was inside your other favorite tools like VSCode and Atom… See how Glo outshines Trello for developers!

Two tools resurfaced from our 2017 list: Android Studio and Xcode.

Postman continues to climb the ranks, moving up 8 spots in the last 2 years. It’s another one to watch!

Six of last year’s top developer tools didn’t make the cut this year: PhpStorm, ZSH, Node.js, Firefox Developer Tools, Stack Overflow, and iTerm2.

GitLab is giving GitHub a run for its money! GitLab climbed the ranks 4 spots and overtook GitHub for the first year. While GitHub had the most significant drop in rankings from number 3 to number 11 year-over-year.

Git held onto the number 4 position for the third year in a row—solidifying the trend that most organizations are migrating to Git for version control.